


Redheads, Blondes, and Brunettes.

by rainer76



Category: Fringe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-15
Updated: 2011-08-15
Packaged: 2017-10-22 15:47:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/rainer76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three women who made an impact on Charlie's life: leading to love, partnership, and death</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redheads, Blondes, and Brunettes.

Redheads:

He has a thing for redheads, alabaster skin, and the gentle slope of a neck. He first sees her in a roomful of lawyers, cutting a swathe across the dance floor, graceful as a swan. It takes him an hour to circle to her position, meeting and greeting with dignitaries, and catches the tale-end of a joke, her voice lilting with invitation.

“…a seaman meets a pirate in a bar, and talk turns to their adventures on the sea. The seaman notes that the pirate has a peg-leg, a hook, and an eye patch. The seaman asks, "So, how did you end up with the peg-leg?" The pirate replies, "We were in a storm at sea, and I was swept overboard into a school of sharks. Just as my men were pulling me out, a shark bit my leg off." "Wow!" said the seaman. "What about your hook?" "Well", replied the pirate, "We were boarding an enemy ship and were battling the other sailors with swords. One of the enemy cut my hand off." "Incredible!" remarked the seaman. "How did you get the eye patch"? "A seagull dropping fell into my eye," replied the pirate. "You lost your eye to a seagull dropping?" the sailor asked incredulously. "Well," said the pirate, "it was my first day with my hook"

She has red-hair, alabaster skin, and it’s possibly the worst joke Charlie’s ever heard. She messes the timing, laughs halfway through the delivery, her face shining with humor, not giving a damn about the horrified politeness around her. Sonia Faulk finds it funny and as result, so does he. Charlie falls in love in thirty-seconds flat, tongue in the corner of his cheek as he invites her to tell him another.

***  
Blondes:

 

He meets the blonde in an underground garage. She’s new. She handles the weapon with studied detachment, checking the firing chamber, running the bullets into the clip one at a time. The behavior’s odd enough to grab Charlie’s attention. She pulls it apart and puts it back together again in less than a minute; takes a solid breath, then starts over, quicker, faster, her fingers more sure. Charlie times her surreptitiously as the guys trade jokes in the background, bolstering their self-esteem with insults. By the third attempt, the rookie’s dropped her time to forty seconds. She places the weapon aside and pulls the bulletproof vest on. She _is _new, Charlie thinks. The vest isn’t fitted; instead it’s the older style of equipment still in circulation, where one-size-fits-all. When the rookie sits down on the bench, the vest hikes up to chin-height, her eyes visible, until she resembles a turtle in a shell. Exasperated, she stands up again.__

He can feel the smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, Charlie doesn’t want to come across as one of those guys – handsy, eyes roaming in all the wrong directions – and says gruffly, “You’re quick.”

She looks startled, a smattering of freckles on the bridge of her nose, her voice low as she answers. “It’s been four years since Basic.”

Military then. She might be drilling herself compulsively but she hasn’t lost the knack. Charlie takes the seat she vacated. “Want to run through your ABC’s with me?”

She’s pretty, her gaze intense as she sways back on her heels. The rookie’s no Sonia in Charlie’s book. She doesn’t have his wife’s ability to find humor in the mundane, as if it were beaten out of her in Basic, or maybe further back, but he’s not in the mood to put up with the fake bravado of the guys behind him, and they have an hour to kill before they pull the sting.

“Ian and Donald McMurty, Irish thugs, they were thought to be connected with the IRA at one stage, wanted for smuggling guns and the selling of cocaine on American soil,” the rookie recites. “Born 1969 and 1972 respectively. Served consecutive terms in British prisons in the early nineties…” She runs through their prison record as if she has it written on the inside of her forearm, then provides Charlie with a verbal plan of the housing commission – fire escapes, number of apartments per floor – and finishes with a list of interconnecting streets that run either side of their burrow.

He’s impressed, more than impressed. Charlie checks his watch just as she finishes. “Charlie Francis,” he says, and adjusts the Velcro on one of her straps, pulling it tighter across her body, his movement in plain view. If she’s new, he’ll take her down to the armourer after the sting; lean on them a little to try and hasten the arrival of her personal equipment.

One-size-fits-all will do in a pinch, but Charlie knows it’s crap to run in, and it makes it impossible to sit.

“Olivia Dunham,” she returns. She’s no longer compulsively checking her weapon, her head tilted to one side as she considers him.

Charlie nods and stands up. “You’re gonna be fine, kid.”

***

Brunettes:

When John Scott dies it all goes to shit. Charlie realizes justice is not influenced by government or democracy, but by the secret boardroom of corporations, a faceless agenda of handshakes. Their investigations are hindered, their enquiries annexed. Their role is obsolete; he tells Olivia, and sees her harden, jaw working silently with denial.

They work with what they’re given; muddle their way through half-truths and pockets of insanity. At night he curls tight around Sonia’s warmth. He wonders if there will be a day he can make a joke about male pregnancy and not feel as if he’s skin’s going to burst wide open, red as a clown’s mouth. He wonders if he can keep Olivia from hurling herself from suicidal heights

When he sees her at Boston General, Olivia is pale, her skin creamy as Sonia’s. Olivia’s hands shake as she pleads for her weapon, for the tactics and calming methods she used of old. He stays by her bedside because Olivia’s his partner, he’s always known when she was afraid, and in Charlie’s experience, her fear is well grounded.

When the call goes out he meets Jessup and Bishop, the three of them split apart, working through the bowels of the hospital.

The ground is damp beneath his feet, the light a twilight shade of grey. He’s coldly furious with the brazen attack, with the continued threat to her person. The weapon remains sure in his hand. When the nurse attacks she’s unexpectedly close. Charlie sees a blur of uniform, a streak of pale blue. Her hair’s a mess, piled into a loose tie-back, brown strands framing her face, the gentle slope of her nape exposed. She looks oddly sweet. Before he met Olivia, Charlie saw his partner gunned down and killed. He doesn’t hesitate. Charlie aims for the center of mass, FBI true, four shots that sink into her heart and breast.

***

 

Charlie crawls into bed at ten fifteen, he lies on his back, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Sonia finishes her nightly routine and flicks the covers over, slides in beneath the sheets, her finger tracing old bullet wounds. There’s a long scar on Charlie’s bicep where he fell out of a tree at age nine (a knife-wound, he told her on their second date), Sonia rubs her thumb against it, the smile curving her face as she nuzzles him. “A BBC journalist heard about a very old Jewish man who had been going to the Wailing Wall to pray, twice a day, every day, for a long, long time. So she went to check it out. She went to the Wailing Wall and there he was, walking slowly up to the holy site. She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, using a cane and moving very slowly, she approached him for an interview "Pardon me, sir, I'm Rebecca Smith from the BBC, What's your name?" "Morris Fishbien," he replied. "Sir, how long have you been coming to the Wailing Wall and praying?" "For about 60 years." "60 years! That's amazing! What do you pray for?" "I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews and the Muslims. I pray for all the wars and all the hatred to stop. I pray for all our children to grow up safely as responsible adults and to love their fellow man." "How do you feel after doing this for 60 years?" "Like I'm talking to a fu***** brick wall!"

 

She turns her head to catch his expression – his eyes are dark, dark pools – there’s one extracted moment where there's no reaction, before Charlie smiles, teeth like silver as he laughs.


End file.
